It is still more difficult to state briefly the action of literature on the individual for what is more distinctly his private gain, in the enlargement of his life, the direction of his thoughts, and bringing him into harmony with the world. As, in regard to civilization, the emphasis lay rather on the literature of knowledge, here it lies on the literature of power,--on imaginative and reflective works. Its initial office is educative; it feeds the imagination and the powers of sympathy, and trains not only the affections but all feeling; and in these fields it is the only instrument of education outside of real experience. It is this that gives it such primacy as to make acquaintance with humane letters almost synonymous with culture. No actual world is large enough for a man to live in; at the lowest, there is some tradition of the past, some expectation of the future; and, though training in the senses is an important part of early life, yet the greater part of education consists in putting the young in possession of an unseen world. The biograph is a marvellous toy of the time, but literature in its lower forms of information, of history, travel and description, has been a biograph for the mind's eye from the beginning; and in its higher forms of art it performs a greater service by bringing into mental vision what it is above the power of nature to produce. To expand the mind to the compass of space and time, and to people these with the thoughts of mankind, to revive the past and penetrate the reality of the present, is the joint work of all literature; and as a preparation for individual life, in unfolding the faculties and the feelings, humane letters achieve their most essential task. Literature furnishes the gymnasia for all youth, in that part of their nature in which the highest power of humanity lies. But this is only, as was said, its initial office. Throughout life it acts in the same way on old and young alike. The dependence of all men on thought, and of thought on speech, is a profound matter, though as little considered as gravitation that keeps the world entire; and the speech on which such a strain of life lies is the speech of books. How has Longfellow consoled middle life in its human trials, how has Carlyle roused manhood, and Emerson illumined life for his readers at every stage! Scott is a benefactor of millions by virtue of the entertainment he has given to English homes and the lonely hours of his fellow-men, now for three generations, to an extent hardly measurable in thought; and so in hardly a less degree is Dickens, and, though diminishing in inclusive power, are Thackeray, Austen, Brontë, Cooper, Hawthorne, George Eliot, to name only novelists. Each century has had its own story-telling from Chaucer down, though masked in the Elizabethan period as drama, and in each much hearty and refined pleasure has been afforded by the spectacle of life in books; but in the last age the benefit so